Shutdown, budget on floor this week

Warring 10-year budget plans come before the House and Senate this week, even as lawmakers must pass a six-month stopgap bill to avert a shutdown and keep agencies operating in the wake of cuts ordered under sequestration.

President Barack Obama is counting on Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) to get her resolution across the Senate floor and set up talks this spring with the Republican House. Playing Martha to Murray’s Mary is Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), whose charge is to keep the government household running through the summer while the “grand bargainers” — well, bargain.

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Next to this novel sisters act in the Senate, the House can seem déjà vu all over again.

That daring young man from Wisconsin is back with another dare: This time House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) says he can bring the whole government into balance in one decade — not three like last spring. To get there Ryan asks Obama only to surrender health care reforms, deny millions Medicaid coverage and food stamps, and accept nondefense appropriations well below what President George W. Bush enjoyed.

Indeed, the next full moon, March 27, is the first deadline for lawmakers since it’s then that the continuing resolution, which has been funding the government since Oct. 1, runs out. Already the Murray-Ryan budget debate is being pegged to a debt ceiling deadline two or three moons ahead in Washington’s summer heat. Since math seems a lost science and Obama is off to the Holy Land on Tuesday, who’s to say Congress can’t also be mystical?

Mikulski, an East Baltimore grocer’s daughter with a sawed-off shotgun temperament, scarcely fits the type. But hers is the first move.

As early as Monday night, the Maryland Democrat hopes to complete Senate passage of a new CR crafted with her ranking Republican, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby. The 587-page package greatly expands on what the House passed this month, but it has also become a magnet for scores of amendments as senators wake up to the fact that this is the only real budget for the next six months.

Republicans want to add conditions to U.S. aid to Egypt — a sore point when Obama will be in the Mideast. Meatpackers, rural airports and coal unions are all seeking rifle-shot changes to protect their favorite accounts from the spending cuts ordered March 1 under sequestration.